The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “He went out with Antônio Vilanova to get food,” he heard him saying dejectedly. “I heard from Abbot João that the whole group that was out in the trenches along the Vaza-Barris got back safely.” His voice choked up and he cleared his throat. “The ones who survived the attack.”

  “What about Joaquinzinho?” the woman said again.

  It was Alexandrinha Correa, the woman people told so many stories about: that she knew how to find underground water sources, that she had been Father Joaquim’s concubine. He was unable to make out her face. She and the curé were sitting on the floor. The inner door of the Sanctuary was open and there did not appear to be anyone inside.

  “He didn’t make it back,” the little priest said softly. “Antônio did, and Honório, and many of the others who were at Vaza-Barris. But he didn’t. Nobody could tell me what happened to him, nobody’s seen him since.”

  “I’d at least like to be able to bury him,” the woman said. “Not just leave him lying there in the open, like an animal with no master.”

  “He may not be dead,” the curé of Cumbe answered. “If the Vilanova brothers and others got back, why shouldn’t Joaquinzinho? Maybe he’s on the towers now, or on the barricade at São Pedro, or with his brother at Fazenda Velha. The soldiers haven’t been able to take the trenches there either.”

  The nearsighted journalist suddenly felt overjoyed and wanted to ask about Jurema and the Dwarf, but he contained himself: he sensed that he ought not to intrude upon the couple’s privacy at this intimate moment. The voices of the curé and the devout disciple were those of calm acceptance of fate, not at all dramatic. The little lamb was nibbling at his hand. He raised himself to a sitting position, but neither Father Joaquim nor the woman seemed to mind that he was there awake, listening.

  “If Joaquinzinho is dead, it’s better if Atanásio dies, too,” the woman said. “So they can keep each other company in death.”

  He suddenly had gooseflesh across the nape of his neck. Was it because of what the woman had said, or the pealing of the bells? He could hear them ringing, very close by, and heard Ave Marias chorused by countless voices. It was dusk, then. The battle had already gone on for almost an entire day. He listened. It was not over yet: mingled with the sound of prayers and bells were salvos of artillery fire. Some of the shells were bursting just above their heads. Death was more important to these people than life. They had lived in utter dereliction and their one ambition was to be given a decent burial. How to understand them? Perhaps, however, if a person were living the sort of life that he was at this moment, death would be his only hope of a reward, a “fiesta,” as the Counselor always called it.

  The curé of Cumbe was looking his way. “It’s sad that children must kill and die fighting,” he heard him murmur. “Atanásio is fourteen, and Joaquinzinho isn’t yet thirteen. They’ve been killing and risking being killed for a year now. Isn’t that sad?”

  “Yes, it is,” the nearsighted journalist stammered. “Indeed it is. I fell asleep. How’s the battle going, Father?”

  “They’ve been stopped at São Pedro,” the parish priest of Cumbe answered. “At the barricade that Antônio Vilanova erected this morning.”

  “Do you mean here inside the city?” the nearsighted man asked.

  “Just thirty paces from here.”

  São Pedro. The street that cut through Canudos from the river to the cemetery, the one parallel to Campo Grande, one of the few that deserved to be called a street. Now it was a barricade and the soldiers were there. Just thirty paces away. A chill ran up his spine. The sound of prayers grew louder, softer, disappeared, mounted again, and it seemed to the nearsighted journalist that in the intervals between explosions he could hear the Counselor’s hoarse voice or the tiny piping voice of the Little Blessed One there outside, and that the women, the wounded, the oldsters, the dying, the jagunço sharpshooters were all reciting the Ave Maria in chorus. What must the soldiers think of these prayers?

  “It’s also sad that a priest should be obliged to take rifle in hand,” Father Joaquim said, patting the weapon that he was holding across his knees, just as the jagunços did. “I didn’t know how to shoot. Father Martinez had never shot a rifle either, not even to go deer-hunting.”

  Was this the same elderly little man the nearsighted journalist had seen whimpering and sniveling before Colonel Moreira César, half dead with panic?

  “Father Martinez?” he asked.

  He sensed Father Joaquim’s sudden wariness. So there were other priests in Canudos with them. He imagined them loading their guns, aiming, shooting. But wasn’t the Church on the side of the Republic? Hadn’t the Counselor been excommunicated by the archbishop? Hadn’t edicts condemning the mad, fanatical heretic of Canudos been read aloud in all the parishes? How, then, could there be curés killing for the Counselor?

  “Do you hear them? Listen, listen: ‘Fanatics, Sebastianists! Cannibals! Englishmen! Murderers!’ Who was it who came here to kill women and children, to slit people’s throats? Who was it who forced youngsters of thirteen and fourteen to become combatants? You’re here and you’re still alive, isn’t that true?”

  He shook with terror from head to foot. Father Joaquim was going to hand him over to the jagunços to be made a victim of their vengeance, their hatred.

  “Because the fact is you came with the Throat-Slitter, isn’t that true?” the curé went on. “And yet you’ve been given a roof over your head, food, hospitality. Would the soldiers do as much for one of Pedrão’s or Pajeú’s or Abbot João’s men?”

  In a choked voice, he stammered in answer: “Yes, yes, you’re right. I’m most grateful to you for having helped me so much, Father Joaquim. I swear it, I swear it.”

  “They’re being killed by the dozens, by the hundreds.” The curé of Cumbe pointed in the direction of the street. “And what for? For believing in God, for living their lives in accordance with God’s law. It’s the Massacre of the Innocents, all over again.”

  Was the priest about to burst into tears, to stamp his feet in rage, to roll about on the floor in despair? But then the nearsighted journalist saw that the priest, controlling himself with an effort, was beginning to calm down, standing there dejectedly listening to the shots, the prayers, the church bells. The journalist thought he heard bugle commands as well. Still not recovered from the scare that he had had, he timidly asked the priest if by chance he had seen Jurema and the Dwarf. The curé shook his head.

  At that moment he heard a melodious baritone voice from close by say: “They’ve been at São Pedro, helping to erect the barricade.”

  The monocle of glass shards allowed him to make out, just barely, the Lion of Natuba alongside the little open door of the Sanctuary, either sitting or kneeling, but in any event hunched down inside his dirt-covered tunic, looking at him with his great gleaming eyes. Had he been there for some time or had he just come in? This strange being, half human and half animal, so disconcerted him that he was unable to thank him or utter a single word. He could hardly see him, for the light had grown dimmer, though a beam of waning light was coming in through the cracks between the pickets of the door and dying away in the unkempt mane of the scribe of Canudos.

  “I wrote down the Counselor’s every word,” he heard him say in his beautiful lilting voice. The words were addressed to him, an effort on the hunchback’s part to be friendly. “His thoughts, his evening counsels, his prayers, his prophecies, his dreams. For posterity. So as to add another Gospel to the Bible.”

  “I see,” the nearsighted journalist murmured, at a loss for words.

  “But there’s no more paper or ink left in Belo Monte and my last quill pen broke. What he says can no longer be preserved for all eternity,” the Lion of Natuba went on, without bitterness, with that calm acceptance with which the journalist had seen the people of Canudos face the world, as though misfortunes, like rainstorms, twilights, the ebb and flow of the tide, were natural phenomena against which it would be stupid to rebel.


  “The Lion of Natuba is an extremely intelligent person,” the curé of Cumbe murmured. “What God took away from him in the way of legs, a back, shoulders, He made up for by way of the intelligence He gave him. Isn’t that so, Lion?”

  “Yes.” The scribe of Canudos nodded, his eyes never leaving the nearsighted journalist. And the latter was certain that this was true. “I’ve read the Abbreviated Missal and the Marian Hours many times. And all the magazines and periodicals that people used to bring me in the old days. Over and over. Have you read a great deal too, sir?”

  The nearsighted journalist felt so ill at ease that he would have liked to run from the room, even if it meant running right into the midst of the battle. “I’ve read a few books,” he answered, feeling ashamed. And he thought: “And I got nothing out of them.” That was something that he had discovered in these long months: culture, knowledge were lies, dead weight, blindfolds. All that reading—and it had been of no use whatsoever in helping him to escape, to free himself from this trap.

  “I know what electricity is,” the Lion of Natuba said proudly. “If you like, sir, I can teach you what it is. And in return, sir, you can teach me things I don’t know. I know what the principle or the law of Archimedes is. How bodies are mummified. The distances between stars.”

  But at that moment there was heavy gunfire from several directions at once, and the nearsighted journalist found himself thanking the battle that had suddenly silenced this creature whose voice, whose proximity, whose very existence caused him such profound malaise. Why was he so disconcerted by someone who simply wanted to talk, who so naïvely flaunted his talents, his virtues, merely to gain his warm fellow-feeling? “Because I’m like him,” he thought. “Because I’m part of the same chain of which he is the humblest link.”

  The curé of Cumbe ran to the little door leading outside, threw it wide open, and a breath of twilight entered that revealed to the nearsighted journalist other of the Lion of Natuba’s features: his dark skin, the fine-drawn lines of his face, the tuft of down on his chin, his steely eyes. But it was his posture that left him dumfounded: the face hunched over between two bony knees, the massive hump behind the head, like a big bundle tied to his back, and the extremities appended to limbs as long and spindly as spider legs. How could a human skeleton dislocate itself, fold itself around itself like that? What absurd contortions were built into that spinal column, those ribs, those bones?

  Father Joaquim and those outside were shouting back and forth: there was an attack, people were needed at a certain place. He came back into the room and the journalist could dimly make out that he was picking up his rifle.

  “They’re attacking the barricades at São Cipriano and São Crispim,” he heard him stammer. “Go to the Temple of the Blessed Jesus. You’ll be safer there. Farewell, farewell, may Our Lady save us all.”

  He ran out of the room and the nearsighted journalist saw Alexandrinha Correa take the lamb, which had begun to bleat in fright, in her arms. The devout disciple from the Sacred Choir asked the Lion of Natuba if he would come with her and in his harmonious voice he answered that he would stay in the Sanctuary. And what about him? What about him? Would he stay there with the monster? Would he tag along after the woman? But she had left now and deep shadow reigned once more in the little room with cane-stalk walls. The heat was stifling. The gunfire became heavier and heavier. He could see the soldiers in his mind’s eye, penetrating the barricade of stones and sandbags, trampling the corpses underfoot, sweeping like a raging torrent down on the place where he was.

  “I don’t want to die,” he said slowly and distinctly, unable, he realized, to shed a single tear.

  “If you like, sir, we’ll make a pact,” the Lion of Natuba said in a calm voice. “We made one with Mother Maria Quadrado. But she won’t have time to get back here. Would you like us to make a pact?”

  The nearsighted journalist was trembling so badly that he was unable to open his mouth. Below the heavy gunfire he could hear, like a peaceful, quietly flowing melody, the bells and the regular counterpoint of Ave Marias.

  “So as not to die by the knife,” the Lion of Natuba explained. “A knife plunged into a man’s throat, slitting it the way you cut an animal’s throat to bleed it to death, is a terrible insult to human dignity. It rends one’s soul. Would you like us to make a pact, sir?”

  He waited for a moment, and since there was no answer, he explained further: “When we hear them at the door of the Sanctuary and it’s certain that they’re going to get inside, we’ll kill each other. Each of us will hold the other’s mouth and nose shut till our lungs burst. Or we can strangle each other with our hands or the laces of our sandals. Shall we make a pact?”

  The fusillade drowned out the Lion of Natuba’s voice. The nearsighted journalist’s head was a dizzying vortex, and all the ideas that rose within him like sputtering sparks—contradictory, threatening, lugubrious—made his anxiety all the more acute. They sat there in silence, listening to the shots, the sound of running footsteps, the tremendous chaos. The light was dying fast and he could no longer see the scribe’s features; all he could make out was the dim outline of his hulking, hunchbacked body. He would not make that pact with him, he would not be able to carry it out; the moment he heard the soldiers he would start shouting I’m a prisoner of the jagunços, help, save me, he would yell out Long live the Republic, Long live Marshal Floriano, he would fling himself on the quadrumane, he would overpower him and turn him over to the soldiers as proof that he wasn’t a jagunço.

  “I don’t understand, I don’t understand. What sort of creatures are you all anyway?” he heard himself say as he clutched his head in his hands. “What are you doing here, why didn’t all of you flee before they had you surrounded? What madness to wait in a rat trap like this for them to come kill you all!”

  “There isn’t anywhere to flee to,” the Lion of Natuba answered. “That’s what we kept doing before. That’s why we came here. This was the place we fled to. There’s nowhere else now—they’ve come to Belo Monte, too.”

  The gunfire drowned out his voice. It was almost dark now, and the nearsighted journalist thought to himself that for him night would fall sooner than for the others. He would rather die than spend another night like the last one. He had a tremendous, painful, biological need to be near his two comrades.

  In a fit of madness, he decided to go look for them, and as he stumbled to the door he shouted: “I’m going to look for my friends. I want to die with my friends.”

  As he pushed the little door open, fresh, cool air hit his face and he sensed—mere blurred shapes in the cloud of dust—the figures of the men defending the Sanctuary sprawled out on the parapet.

  “Can I leave? Can I please leave?” he begged. “I want to find my friends.”

  “Come ahead,” a voice answered. “There’s no shooting just now.”

  He took a few steps, leaning against the barricade, and almost immediately he stumbled over something soft. As he rose to his feet, he found himself in the arms of a thin, female form clutching him to her. From the warm odor of her, from the happiness that flooded over him, he knew who it was before he heard her voice. His terror turned to joy as he embraced this woman as desperately as she was embracing him. A pair of lips met his, clung to his, returned his kisses. “I love you,” he stammered, “I love you, I love you. I don’t care now if I die.” And as he said again and again that he loved her, he asked her for news of the Dwarf.

  “We’ve been looking for you all day long,” the Dwarf said, his arms encircling the journalist’s legs. “All day long. What a blessing that you’re alive!”

  “I don’t care now if I die either,” Jurema’s lips said beneath his. “This is the house of the Pyrotechnist,” General Artur Oscar suddenly exclaims. The officials who are reporting on the number of dead and wounded in the attack that he was given orders to halt look at him in bewilderment. The general points to some half-finished skyrockets, made of reeds and pegs held to
gether with pita fiber, scattered about the dwelling. “He’s the one who prepares their fireworks displays for them.”

  Of the eight blocks—if the jumbled piles of rubble can be called “blocks”—that the troops have taken in nearly twelve hours of fighting, this one-room hut, with a partition of wooden slats dividing it in two, is the only one that has been left standing, more or less. This is the reason why it has been chosen as general headquarters. The orderlies and officers surrounding the commandant of the expeditionary corps cannot understand why he is speaking of rockets just as the list of casualties after the hard day’s battle is being read off to him. They do not know that fireworks are a secret weakness of General Oscar’s, a powerful holdover from his childhood, and that in O Piauí he would seize on any sort of patriotic celebration as an excuse to order a fireworks display to be set off in the courtyard of the barracks. In the month and a half that he has been here, he has watched with envy, from the heights of A Favela, the cascades of lights in the sky above Canudos on certain nights when processions have been held. The man who prepares such displays is a master; he could earn himself a good living in any city in Brazil. Can the Pyrotechnist have died in today’s battle? As the general ponders that question, he also pays close attention to the figures being read off by the colonels, majors, captains who enter and leave or remain in the tiny room already enveloped in darkness. An oil lamp is lit, and a detail of soldiers piles sandbags along the wall facing the enemy.